Boston Wrong

I live around here, and I spent a couple days chasing this story, so I understand that feelings are a bit raw, but can Boston stop losing its mind over a photograph now, please?

Boston Magazine scored a scoop when a police sergeant released to it photos of the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, showing the alleged Boston Marathon bomber bloodied and half-dead following his encounter with police in a back yard in Watertown. This, it was said, was to soothe the injured feelings of the local hysterics who were offended by the fact that Rolling Stone ran on its cover a photo of Tsarnaev in which he did not have bolts in his neck or something. Now, the cop is suspended, and everybody's arguing again, and it's 97-goddamn degrees, and I keep waiting for Mookie to bring me a pizza from Sal's Famous so that somebody can start a fight. And what once was a terrible story that ended with an outburst of warm civic pride is now one of those media things about which everyone gets uselessly angry.

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(Dan Kennedy, the fine local media critic, made the only point compelling enough to make, which is why we didn't have these capture photos in the first place. They're the living definition of public record. But since every police department thinks its the CIA these days, secrecy is reflexive.)

Outside of a big old fk-you to Jann Wenner, what was the release of these bloody photos supposed to prove? That the climactic firefight in the Watertown neighborhood was worse than we were led to believe? If it was to give everyone a vicarious thrill to see the bomber half-dead, that that was simple vengeful sadism and the policeman's suspension more than warranted on those ground alone. This guy's going to have to have a trial here. Somebody's going to have to sit on a jury. Having everyone riled up every couple of months is not going to make either one of those easier. And, now, I am not optimistic at all about the coverage of that trial.

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